Mickey Mantle’s Last Home Run

Steven A. Falco| iUniverse 226p, trade paper, $13.99, ISBN 978-15320-5208-8

Falco (Grandpa Gordy’s Greatest World Series Games) sets this touching young adult story of sports and unexpected connections in 1968 New Jersey, in a town that’s racially diverse but tense. It centers on T. J., a high-school sophomore who loves baseball and hanging out with his friends Jonathan, Frankie, and Phil. He’s also a struggling JV baseball player who accidentally hits a Black teammate in the eye, earning him the enmity of the other Black players. The clever and funny Jonathan is his best friend, classmate, and teammate, and he’s the ringleader of all sorts of shenanigans in school to help alleviate boredom. While they’re friends, the racial divide between them comes into play in a number of ways.

The story’s handling of references to sports, urban neighborhoods, high school hijinks, and racism resonate as deeply today. While T.J.’s hero is Mickey Mantle, the aging star of the New York Yankees, Jonathan’s hero is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he affectionately refers to as “the Doc.” Falco captures the tumult of the era with clear eyes and welcome complexity. When King is assassinated, it changes everything, as Jonathan refuses to talk to any white people, including T.J. Young readers will relate as a confused and hurt T.J. struggles with that rejection, with threats from some teammates, and pressure from Frankie’s friends to join in with other white people for “protection.” It takes another national tragedy to bring T.J. and Jonathan back together.

Falco’s use of humor to establish the camaraderie between T.J. and Jonathan helps ground their later conflict, turning national crises into interpersonal ones. Telling the story through T.J.’s first-person narration also allows the reader to intimately experience historical events while revealing T.J.’s limitations in processing them. Falco navigates the rigors of growing up in a tumultuous time with grace, wit, and empathy.

This resonant YA novel finds teen athletes facing racial divisions in the tumultuous late 1960s.

Great for fans of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham.